Equivocality

There are myths to travel. There are mythic voyages of the ones who went before. A long time ago, somebody rode a motorcycle all through Indonesia, and then spent four months in a crumbling room in Jakarta penning the very first Lonely Planet. We all want to be that person, every last backpacking one of us. Like Joseph Conrad, we are irresistibly drawn to the vast blank spaces on the map. But there aren’t any, not anymore.

You still sometimes meet that generation. You run into an aging hippy in a tourist bar in Laos who will tell you how you used to be able to get into Afghanistan with a bottle of whisky and a pack of American cigarettes for the border guards. The golden age — the age of the myths and dreams for me and every other international rat — seems to have been the 1960s, when the borders were mostly open and Western kids were setting out for something new. So I’m told. I don’t know for sure what it was like, because I wasn’t there. I do know that the time generated a number of legends, which are now the names of far away places, and still sound almost mystical. Tangier. Bali. Islamabad. Kathmandu. And India, of course India. There was something to discover then, something to bring back. That first photo of a white person standing next to a tribal woman with a lip plate must have really been something, back before it got printed in all the Ethiopia guidebooks.

We chase those myths still. They’re the dream that sends us away from home. For that I am thankful, but these stories have also broken my heart. They’re from a world long gone.

The world at the present time is both big and small. Although we still don’t understand each other — when was the last time you talked to someone living on a different continent in a different culture? — nowhere is out of reach any more. Airfare is too cheap. Communications are too simple. Time was, your family only heard from you through postcards; and you checked not instantaneous email but faulty, unreliable post restante in every new city. Declarations of love from afar were written on yellowed paper, and if you didn’t know for certain where the letter might catch you, well, that was all the more romantic.

“Meet me in the central square of Islamabad on April 15th at noon,” you would say to her on your last night together in the sweltering, alien heat. “Yes, my love,” she would reply, “inshallah.” God willing. The world away was more uncertain then. A long way from home, a long distance from civilization as you knew it, reality itself wavered, seemed subject to new laws. It’s that waking dream I still chase, that suspension of disbelief, the step into an alternate universe, but it’s getting harder and harder to find. There is a McDonalds on too many corners now

We rail. We despair. We decry globalization as it homogenizes the old cultures of the world. We pull out our palmtops and write about the corrupting influence of technology. First we curse the broken-down bus on the dirt road, then we fret over the changes that paved highways bring. Above all, we try to get farther, weirder, more authentic somehow. We don’t want to know that the nomads all carry mobile phones now. Really what we want is to be standing in the same place 100 years ago, but the truth is that we wouldn’t have been there, because we don’t have the guts to travel without a guidebook. And the solo sojourns of yesteryear become the adventure tours of today, and then the package holidays of tomorrow. The change happens so gradually we don’t notice. We don’t want to notice, because it tells us how unoriginal we are.

Poverty, too, we don’t understand any better than we used to. It makes us very uncomfortable to be surrounded by filth, to be reminded of ignorance and desperation. All we understand now is that we can’t call them savages anymore. We see people eat with their hands, mutilate the genitals of their female children, bribe their way to the top of government and laugh contemptuously at the stupidity of those of another religion, not even bothering to mask their racism as decent people would. Well, what of it? Sure, Western culture invented democracy and the internet, but then again, as one thoughtful African reminded me, we also put a hole in the ozone layer. We come to understand all of this, and if we are lucky we are changed, but we don’t know what to bring back home. In the end we settle on some crappy souvenirs hand-made by one of the last villages of indigenous peoples, as encouraged under the white eyes of a smiling NGO worker.

Why do we travel at all? Every one of us — and we know who “we” are, and maybe you are one of us too — every traveler has asked themselves this question many times. There is never a clear answer. It’s partially for us, and it’s partially for the world. It’s about discovering what we can, both within and without. It’s about exploration. It’s about learning something. If we can manage it, it’s about teaching something. It used to be that you could discover something new just by going physically far away from where you started.

But now they get HBO in Cambodia.

You can still learn a lot about yourself by leaving home, but don’t kid yourself that you’re automatically going to bring back anything better or more insightful than what’s already written in a thick book in your local library.

Changing places is not enough. Exploration requires something else. If physically getting there is easy, really being there is still very hard. It requires learning languages. It requires making friends. It requires time and work. It’s can be a very lonely, alienating experience. It requires reflection, and study, and careful deconstruction of one’s own prejudices and expectations. Yes, you wanted to see nomads leading their camels across the desert. You wanted Africans with buckets on their heads, authentic Thai curry and fresh Yak cheese. You wanted to be in the pictures from the books, but now the nomads drive Toyotas and show you Britney Spears videos on their mobile phones, and it turns out that real Thai curry is too hot for you to eat anyway. And although you could experience the old strange magic of total disconnection by eschewing the internet while you’re in Africa, that’s about you, not them. In the evenings they’re in the cybercafés chatting on Skype. We are disappointed, we feel vaguely cheated, we decide that reality is somehow less interesting than the myths.

And too, we all wanted to go where no one has gone before. We have this dream of being observers. But we’re not observers. There are too many of us, and we change the thing we are looking at. I’ve seen it dozens of times. A few travelers arrive at a beautiful place. At first, no one speaks English. Eventually someone realizes that they can make money by running a guesthouse. The guesthouse starts to offer Western food, and perhaps music. The place gets written up in a guidebook. More tourists come. The man in the next village who used to invite foreigners to tea just for the novelty of it starts to charge for the cultural experience. At some critical mass, the internet arrives. More guesthouses spring up. With the money coming into the town, people modernize. They buy machinery, fertilizer, and cars, but of course they save a few traditional houses, camels, rice paddies, whatever, just to show the tourists their ancient way of life. Eventually, culture turns into theatre. The locals make money, or at least some of them do, and the tourists get their postcard images. Everyone is happy. But why are we — foreigners and locals alike — why are we doing this?

The last stage of bicultural evolution is the resort town. Intrepid British explorers used to come to Agadir to see the camel market. Now they come to gamble, to dine on imported lobster, and to sun themselves by the pool. And maybe, just maybe, these are the same people who found Morocco untamed and exotic when they were single and poor. My great fear is that I have so far discovered only the myths profitably sold to me, that I am really no different than them. So I read St. Exupery in the desert nearby and cry slightly that Agadir holds no more mystery. But of course it does; just not where Exupery says it used to be. It’s somewhere else now, not physically but psychically. If I’m really the traveler I think I am — if I can figure out what it means to be an explorer in an interconnected age — then I will find it, and I will at last understand the new stories that must be written.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 2nd, 2007 at 10:56 am and is filed under Nonfiction, Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.